Quarterly roundup: Your November 2022 news from Dryad 

Welcome to the Dryad newsletter, keeping you up to date with data policies and compliance, Dryad product developments and events, and more. To get latest news and developments from Dryad delivered straight to your inbox, please sign up to join our mailing list.


Register for Dryad’s November open house

Emerging data publishing guidance set out by the recent memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) require change from researchers, institutions, and publishing organizations. Simply posting data to the internet will not meet these new criteria.  

On November 30, Dryad will host its first Open House event to discuss ‘How to align with new US data access policies’ to support those affected and their transition to meet new requirements for open access to research data.  

To ensure as many of our community can join as possible, we will be running two sessions on November 30.


New Board of Directors and team members

Dryad welcomes new international Board of Directors and team members to support the organization in addressing major national policy developments and enhancing the platform to serve the evolving needs of researchers.  

The governing board includes four new members who offer a wealth of experience and diverse perspectives and knowledge in open research data publishing:  

  •   Andrew Beckerman, University of Sheffield 
  •   Barbara Ebert, German Federation for Biological Data e.V. 
  •   Kristi Holmes, Northwestern University 
  •   Devika Madalli, Indian Statistical Institute.  

The team expansion includes the appointment of five accomplished individuals

  • Bryan Gee as Curator 
  • Audrey Hamelers as Senior Full Stack Developer 
  • Jess Herzog as Head of Publishing Services 
  • Mark Kurtz as Head of Business Operations 
  • Sarah Lippincott as Head of Community Engagement  

Dryad’s stance on U.S. data policies

“…Dryad is well-positioned to support research communities that will rapidly need to develop research management strategies in response to the policy…” – Sarah Lippincott, Head of Community Engagement

Dryad serves and supports all stakeholders across the research data landscape through complying with, evaluating, and providing the most up-to-date information on new and existing data policy. The below blog entries explore in detail Dryad’s role and support across three important policy announcements and updates:  


Making Dryad more data science friendly

By undertaking a detailed analysis in 2022 of the Dryad corpus and the API, and establishing a partnership in 2021 with Frictionless to run data validation across all new submissions, combined with community listening, it revealed that with any data publisher, value needs to lie in the usability of published datasets. Dryad has used this insight to focus on feature sets that are centered on reusability, machine usability, and pluggability – through aligning with popular data science tools, educating researchers along the submission process with more complex checks, and automated tooling for quality, and more.  

 “Becoming part of the Dryad community has helped us at Lane Medical Library build stronger connections with researchers on campus, engage more fully in discussions related to the management and sharing of research data, and become part of the broader open science community. Being able to address the question ‘How should I share my data?’ with a top of the line and curation-focused platform not only helps us to address an immediate need but allows us to position the library as a source of expertise on related issues more generally.”

– John Borghi, Director, Research & Instruction, Lane Medical Library, Stanford 

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